Eggcorn Forum

Announcement

Registrations were closed for a long time because of forum spam, but I have re-opened them on a trial basis.

The forum administrator (chris dot waigl at gmail dot com) reserves the right to request users to plausibly demonstrate that they are real people with an interest in the topic of eggcorns. Otherwise they may be removed with no further justification. Likewise, accounts that have not been used for posting may be removed.

intercalcate << intercalate

Adding extra days and months in order to make a calendar conform to position of the earth in its orbit around the sun has been called “intercalation” since at least the seventeenth century. We can see in the verb “intercalate” the Latin prefix for “between” and the Latin stem that gave birth to “calends” and “calendar.”

In the nineteenth century the word was metaphorically extended to the act of embedding in a standard series. Geologists became fond of the word, lacing their language with talk of “intercalated strata.” The word appealed to mathematicians who needed to insert numbers into an ordered set. Biologists turned to “intercalate” to lend a soupçon of opaque sagacity to their prose. These metaphorical uses of “intercalate/intercalated” in modern corpora far outnumber the literal uses of the word.

“Intercalate” is popularly (hundreds of web examples) spelled as “intercalcate.” I assume users are trying to find a reference to calculation in the word.

Re: intercalcate << intercalate

I was just about to add a post on “intercollate/intercolate.” Great minds think alike (As do small minds. Sometimes great minds also think like small minds and small minds think like great minds. Parallel ponderings prove nothing but parallelism, I fear.)

The spelling with one “l” (“intercolated cells” examples here ) suggests that the user is permuting “calate” rather than inventing “intercollate” from Latin precursors.

Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Latest book: Boundary Layer